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“Finish the story,” I say. “What happened? How did I lose my mother?”
“She refused to let you go,” Dugald says.
“And you didn’t force her? There’s more to this story then you’re saying. No way in the world you were going to let her say no thank you and walk away.”
Dugald’s face darkens, and he stares over my head.
“I had my orders,” he says.
“The perfect excuse to not have a heart,” I snap. “I can’t believe that in any lifetime I could ever love you. How did I ever love a man who has no heart?”
Moira gasps softly but the pain on Dugald’s face is all the pay I need and want. All my anger, the boiling rage, is focusing on him. I could have saved Duncan, but he stopped me. I could have had a mother, but he took her. Everything that has gone wrong in my life centers around him.
Dugald tenses his jaw, clenches his hands into fists, and lets them go. Then he nods and his shoulders slump.
“She refused to let you go,” he says, continuing as if I didn’t cut him to his soul. “We made a deal. She would raise you until you were eight years old.”
The age I was when she disappeared.
“You were going to come back then?”
“Yes. She would train you, prepare you, and make sure you and your father understood. Then I would return and take you to the Fae lands to finish training.”
“I’d point out that our side didn’t know any of this,” Siobhan says, waving a finger back and forth.
“Hush, Siobhan,” Moira says.
“What do you mean by that?” I ask, turning to the vampire.
“The Unseelie,” Siobhan says. “We weren’t part of this grand plan to train the Destroyer. It’s against the rules.”
“What rules?”
“We’re not supposed to interfere,” Siobhan says. “Your decision is to be made without the encumbrance or influence of our input.”
“No, the Unseelie court didn’t know,” Dugald admits.
“Why not?” I ask.
“Because they would have stopped us,” Dugald says. “They liked the way the world was. Order serves them well but as order became more and more dominant, magic was dying. The Tree of Life was dying. My Queen knew that if you chose order over magic one more time, that would be the end of us.”
“And so, you made a plan to manipulate me,” I say. “But that doesn’t explain what happened.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Dugald says. “When you were eight years old, I returned but when I did, your mother sacrificed herself to protect you.”
My throat clenches tight as the loss of her hits like a punch to the gut.
“How?”
Dugald shakes his head but doesn’t answer.
“She found a book that contained a blood spell which she performed,” Moira says, filling in for Dugald. “It shouldn’t have been possible, those were banished, but your mother loved you very much. She did it to protect you.”
“But it didn’t work,” I say. “I’m here, now.”
“When you came to Scotland, it broke the spell,” Moira says.
“Things that would have been good to know,” I say.
